Oh my. Here we go! Two out of my four classes have wrapped up for the semester and my Freshman’s review is this Wednesday, so time is really ticking away! This week will be full of model making and drawing touch ups (not to mention getting ready to move!). A lot has to happen in the next twenty days if this is all going to come together: presentations, exhibits, reviews, packing, book making, celebrating, then graduating! I’ll be sure to post process photos of my model over the next few days, because I’m pretty excited about how it will *hopefully* come out. Fingers crossed! All I’ll say is it involves 35 sheets of corrugated cardboard, a gallon of gesso, and a bag of potting soil.

I also spent some time yesterday photographing my watercolor portfolio, and I was excited to see some real improvement! I’m no artist, but I can see a real difference between my first few paintings and my last ones.

Wow, what an intense couple of weeks it has been. I can’t even believe how fast time is flying by, I only have 17 days until my thesis is due! Not to mention less than a month until graduation. That last fact is probably the hardest to grapple with. When you’ve spent the better portion of your life as a student, it’s hard to imagine being anything else. Friday night a few of us took advantage of the empty studios and set up camp to sketch, watercolor, and stain until studio closed. As we were sitting around blasting our music, snacking, and enjoying the emptiness, it was hard to think that in less than a month this won’t be our life anymore. That’s how you really know the end is near when nostalgia starts setting in!

On a lighter note, everything seems to wrapping up nicely! With Professional Practice and Interpreting Spaces ending this week, I’ll be able to concentrate almost exclusively on thesis (with the occasional watercolor break, of course). With a “dry run” of our final presentation this Thursday it’s all getting real! Since our class has opted for a half exhibition/half presentation style review I had to rearrange my final presentation to incorporate the “story” I read for my critics before each presentation. You can check it out below! (Sorry for the small size, but if you click on the image, you can view it bigger!)

Just stopping by to show you all the “final” product for my midterm in watercolor. If you want to see all the layers leading up to this image check out my previous post on how it was made (we were given one more class time to touch it up). All in all, I’m happy with the product!

It’s midway through spring break, and after spending a short (but well worth it) long weekend in New Hampshire I’m back into the swing of things. Today I spent the morning organizing and preparing my schedule for the weeks ahead. A clean room, desk, computer, and planner makes everything a little easier to focus on. It was good to regenerate and refocus, but with a watercolor portfolio check, a thesis review, and the first draft of our final project in Professional Practice all coming up next week a full week off was not an option! But in 1 month and 13 days we’ll be walking across the stage for our graduate degree (exactly 8 months since our undergraduate graduation!!), so you won’t hear any complaints over here! How do we mange such a work/work schedule? For me, with Pandora, Grooveshark, Hulu, and breaks on Pintrest, my bookmarks bar is a blessing and a curse! But if you listen to your favorite soundtrack while working or half watch a show while you’re water coloring, it [partially] lessens the blow of having to work during “spring break”.

Water coloring is mainly a process of layering, layering, and more layering. For our midterm project we’ve been working on replicating another artists painting (I choose Z.L. Feng’s Image #9). You can see the process below! The only thing I wasn’t particularity happy about what the “splatter” technique at the end. We were encouraged to paint the splatter instead of splattering it and I feel it takes away from the spirit of the painting, but overall I like how it came out!